Rating and value of paintings by Adolphe Monticelli

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Rating and value of the artist Adolphe Monticelli

Considered one of the precursors of Fauvism, Adolphe Monticelli quickly established himself in twentieth-century art. This legacy is made up of various creations : mainly oils on canvas, including landscapes. 

At present, prices for his works are rising enormously under the auctioneers' hammer. 

His oils on canvas are particularly prized, and the price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €45 to €432,000, a considerable gap but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to Monticelli's paintings. 

A still life dating from 1880, entitled Grande nature morte au pichet, was sold for €432,000 while it was estimated at between €119,000 and €178,700. 

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Style and technique of Adolphe Monticelli

Adolphe Monticelli (1824 - 1886) was a painter from Marseilles, a precursor of Impressionism, who worked almost exclusively in oil on canvas. Sometimes, he also used wood panels.

He showed a preference for medium or small formats, suited to his impasto and material work. He uses thick brushes and knives, which enable him to build up the pictorial paste.

His style is characterized by dense, heavy paste painting, with very thick impasto. The pictorial surface is regularly striated, rough or uneven, giving the canvas a strong materiality.

The workmanship is vibrant and gestural, with visible brushstrokes, thus asserting the presence of gesture. The effect of transparency is limited, the paste being applied in successive opaque layers.

The artist's palette is rich and saturated, dominated by warm tones (reds, oranges, golds, browns, enhanced by greens and blues). His work shows a taste for sumptuous, decorative harmonies, where color prevails over drawing.

He frequently uses intense contrasts of light, which reinforces the dramatic, baroque dimension. His subjects are often difficult to read from a distance, with figures and objects dissolving into the colored matter.

He constructs his compositions in clusters and juxtaposed strokes rather than sharp contours. His recurring themes of choice are galant festive scenes (in the tradition of Watteau), bouquets of flowers, still lifes and Provencal landscapes.

The compositions favor a painterly, luminous mood over precise narrative. Monticelli inherited his work from Delacroix, whose sense of color and movement he admired.

He was also a precursor of Impressionism, thanks to his taste for free brushstrokes and light announcing the research of Cézanne and Van Gogh. His style is sometimes described as Provençal Baroque Romanticism, in which the pictorial material takes precedence over the subject depicted.

His canvases give an impression of chromatic and tactile luxuriance, akin to mosaic or enamel. The reading is often sensory before figurative, calling on the viewer to perceive color as an experience in itself.

His style, sometimes judged " unfinished " by his academic contemporaries, was in fact a pictorial revolution that was admired by Van Gogh. The latter saw in him a master in the use of matter and color.

The life of Adolphe Monticelli

Adolphe Monticelli (1824 - 1886) was born in Marseille, into a modest family. He trained as a painter at the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille between 1838 and 1846, where he learned academic drawing.

He then moved to Paris in 1846, where he briefly frequented Paul Delaroche's studio and copied the Old Masters at the Louvre, notably Watteau and Delacroix. He exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon in the 1850s.

He worked in Marseille and then in Paris, painting mainly portraits, landscapes and genre scenes. The artist quickly developed a singular style, which is marked by a thick paste and a pronounced taste for color.

Insettled in Paris in the 1850s-1860s, he made friends with Romantic painters and writers. An admirer of Delacroix and Venetian painting, Monticelli asserted a freer, more colorful approach than his academic contemporaries. His art, now considered too daring and " unfinished ", remains marginal in the face of official standards.

He returned to Marseille in 1870, after the war and the fall of the Second Empire. The artist lived and painted in relative isolation, with no real institutional recognition. He produced numerous works on Provence, including landscapes, bouquets and gallant scenes.

Monticelli died in Marseille in 1886, virtually forgotten by institutions and little recognized during his lifetime. Van Gogh, who arrived in Arles in 1888, admired his work and called him a precursor in the expressive use of color and matter.

His works also influenced Cézanne and heralded some of the research of Expressionism. Today, Monticelli is seen as a visionary painter of the South, and an inventor of an autonomous pictorial language.

Focus on Scène galante dans un parc, Adolphe Monticelli, 1870

This painting by Monticelli, a medium-format oil on canvas, is a gathering of elegant figures outdoors, inherited from the tradition of Watteau and fêtes galantes.

The composition is materialized by a group of figures gathered in the foreground, sometimes seated, sometimes standing. The background is treated as vaporous and indistinct, suggesting a park, trees and a sunny sky.

The organization is deliberately blurred, and moving, with no clear contours. The scene reads like a cloud of colored shapes. The palette is warm (gold, red, ochre, brown, orange), punctuated by deep greens and blues. The light is not localized but diffuse, permeating the entire surface of the painting.

The colors are laid down in thick masses, blending directly onto the canvas, producing vibrating effects. The impastos are very dense, almost sculptural, bringing out the materiality of the painting.

The knife brush marks are visible, giving the surface a rather rough texture. There is no apparent preparatory drawing; the work is based on direct, intuitive painting.

The figures appear and disappear in the colored paste, giving an impression of transience and dreaminess. The gallant scene creates a festive atmosphere rather than telling a story.

The dissolution of forms in color, meanwhile, announces Monticelli's desire to paint the impression of a moment rather than descriptive reality.

Van Gogh, when he discovered Monticelli, admired this ability to give color expressive autonomy and transform pictorial matter into language. The work illustrates the transition between decorative Romanticism (inherited from Watteau and Delacroix) and a pictorial modernity that heralds Impressionism and even, according to some art historians, Expressionism.

Recognizing the artist's signature  

Adolphe Monticelli's works are often signed, his signature can vary from year to year. Here's an example.

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